


The Power of the Telling

by Farasha



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Interlude, Literary References & Allusions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:50:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6663145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farasha/pseuds/Farasha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a quiet moment back at New Providence, in Miranda's house, John Silver ponders the man James Flint might have been once upon a time. Flint still knows so little about his quartermaster, it seems that John can still surprise him, even in the smallest things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Power of the Telling

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [Craftnarok](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Craftnarok/pseuds/Craftnarok) in the [pirate_prompts_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/pirate_prompts_2016) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
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> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> I'd love a fic where Flint finds out that he and Silver share a love of books. 
> 
> It's been touched on before, Silver reading the books in Flint's cabin, but I'd be interested to see something more about the opinions they share, the things it turns out they've both read, the languages they can read in. I think they'd surprise each other. 
> 
> Extra love if you can work it into them beginning to gift each other books they find, with little enigmatic inscriptions in the front, like Flint did with the Hamiltons. 
> 
> Silver/Flint would be nice, but just friends works for me too.

Flint was different when he was in this house. By now, John thought he'd seen every imaginable side of him. That night by the fire, sharing a bottle of rum, unearthing the past and burying the future in the same stroke, he thought he'd at last taken the full measure of James Flint.

He should have known the man would only continue to surprise him. They had only returned to New Providence to collect Billy - and instead had found their bosun stirring up a legend, a quill in his hand instead of a sword. They couldn't linger, not when they were both among the most wanted men alive on this very island, but John took one look at the stiff line of Flint's back and sent Billy out for supplies.

"Take him with you," John said, tilting his head over at Ben Gunn. He had a feeling Flint needed some time here without his crew around him. Every other time they'd come, there had been others - intruding on Flint's grief, getting their hands all over Flint's memories.

Billy gave him a hard stare, looking between John and the captain. "You can't leave the house. You can't go _anywhere_. Long John Silver is a phantom and Captain Flint is back from the dead, we can't have you spotted in broad daylight."

John huffed, shook his head, felt his old wry grin tugging at his mouth. "We aren't going anywhere until nightfall." Billy didn't move for a moment more, perhaps trying to impress on John exactly how important it was that his delicate narrative not unravel at this juncture. John was perfectly aware of the critical stage - he'd nursed a con or two of his own through this, and he knew how easily it could collapse.

"Go." Flint broke his silence at last. He stood in the center of the room, his hands behind his back, the back of one laid neatly in the palm of the other. His shoulders were squared, his spine straight, chin lifted - the only thing missing from the picture was his hair. John imagined him for a moment - younger, that brilliant red of his hair longer, tied back neatly at his nape.

He shook himself from the thought as Billy finally left, dragging Ben with him, leaving the two of them alone. John let out his breath slowly, so the sigh wasn't audible. The imagined sight he'd conjured in his mind seemed strangely doubled over Flint as he stood now, perhaps unconsciously falling back into the posture of an officer and a gentleman. Silver had guessed, long before Flint told him, that at one point in his life he'd been a man of society. It was something else entirely, seeing the evidence in the line of Flint's back.

John distanced himself from those thoughts by moving, which was always a distraction to him in these days. He had almost grown used to the gait, to the pain when he set the leg down. He could move more easily than he had before his stint as the Maroon Queen's hostage, but it still took attention - still didn't feel natural.

"I must say, of all the things I expected to find when we returned here, this was not it." John stumped his way to the table, lowering himself slowly to sit on the bench, his hand going unconsciously to his thigh, squeezing above the knee. It eased the ache, sometimes. "I admit to being a little put out - I believe I prefer playing Scheherazade to being the subject of the tale myself."

He had meant only to fill the uncomfortable silence, but Flint turned, his brow knit in the quizzical look he gained sometimes when John did something he didn't expect - something that added another layer to Flint's mental picture of his quartermaster. "Scheherazade?"

"Have you not read it? _Les mille et une nuits_ \- it was very popular when I was younger." John kneaded at the muscle of his thigh, tempted to rip the boot free from his leg and throw it. "I remember it in French, but I imagine it would have been translated again."

The sound of Flint's boots on the wooden floor pulled John's attention from his leg. Flint crossed the room to him, dragged a stool over from the fireplace, and sat down in front of him - close enough that their knees brushed. Surprise stilled John's movements.

"May I?" Flint asked, his hands paused inches away from the leg of John's trousers.

A snarl of some inscrutable emotion caged John's voice behind his teeth. This wasn't the first time Flint had been solicitous when it came to his health, but before it had always been a passing concern. This was different. As soon as John nodded wordlessly, Flint curled his hands around John's thigh, lifting the artificial leg into his lap and beginning to roll up the leg of his trousers.

"I recall the title," Flint said. It threw John for a moment - he hadn't expected Flint to continue the conversation any more than he'd expected the gentle motions of his hands as he unbuckled the boot from John's thigh. "I haven't had the chance to read it, though."

"I would have expected a man of society to keep up with the latest popular literature," John said. He wasn't sure if he was trying for teasing or curious - his voice sounded strangely flat to his own ears. Perhaps that owed to the way the blood was rushing in his head. The careful brush of Flint's fingers over his skin would have set him to shivering if he didn't curl his fingers around the wood of the bench in a white-knuckled grip.

"I wasn't." Flint eased the artificial limb off. Even with an effort to be gentle, the stump throbbed, provoking a grunt from John. Flint looked up, meeting his eyes. John thought he saw an apology in their depths.

It was too much. "Come again?"

"A man of society. I wasn't." Flint's gaze dropped back to the stump of John's leg. He smoothed one hand over the hot, reddened skin, chafed from the boot. John swallowed. Flint's palm was dry and calloused, gentle - opposite of everything John had thought of him in his infrequent fantasies. He forced himself to listen as Flint continued, baring yet more of his soul. "Thomas and Miranda were, but Thomas was a man of philosophy. The nature of man fascinated him. Miranda was more partial to myth and fantasy, but even she preferred the traditional classics. I remember-" 

He stopped, his hands stilling, catching himself in his mind's wandering. John found that he'd leaned closer as Flint spoke, and the two of them were separated now by mere inches of space.

"I wouldn't have guessed it," John said, breaking the silence before it could become awkward. "You carry yourself like an officer."

"I was an officer. Just not a gentleman." Flint's tone was inscrutable again, like he'd realized how much more of himself he kept giving away. John kept waiting for him to stop, to put the walls back up and distance himself from John again the way he'd kept himself at arm's length for so long. Instead, Flint moved on to prodding the sore tissue of John's leg with his fingertips. "I didn't know you spoke French."

John winced as Flint hit a particularly sore spot. " _Assez bien, bien que je n'aie pas practicé depuis des années_. I'm told my accent is hideous. I have better Spanish."

"Does it often swell like this?" Flint asked, resting his palm over the most swollen part, right above where Howell had folded the skin under and stitched it.

"Whenever I walk on it too long." There was something in this - Flint's hands on him, the closeness of their bodies, the talk of their pasts. Something lurked just beneath the surface, inviting and dangerous all at the same time. "What about you? Were you a man of philosophy or a man of the classics?"

"Neither," Flint said. His eyes crinkled, one side of his mouth pulling wryly to one side. John was arrested by it, as he always was when Flint smiled. It was a glimpse of the man underneath, and every time John saw it he couldn't help but want more. "I saw enough of the nature of man in my own life, and I could never read tragedy for enjoyment, which is a fondness of the Greeks." Flint swallowed against the roughness in his voice, perhaps remembering fond arguments over the subject. "I had a particular partiality to _Le morte d'Arthur_ as a boy, though I read it in English. Miranda encouraged me to learn Spanish. I enjoyed _Don Quixote_."

The image struck John suddenly - a boy with messy, red-gold hair, his nose buried in a book of grand adventure, knights and chivalry. He wouldn't have been able to prevent the smile it gave him if he tried, nor the soft huff of a laugh that escaped his chest. The half-smile on Flint's lips broadened, a flash of white teeth against the red of his beard, and John's mouth went suddenly dry.

"What _is_ this?" he asked, the question coming out softer than he intended, quiet and nearly vulnerable in a way that made his stomach churn.

Flint, thankfully, did not play coy, though he did withdraw. The smile faded, the lines of his face deepening. He looked tired, like he had that night around the fire - tired and burdened with memory. "Nothing you have to accept if you don't want it," he said, and his hands left John's leg. "You shouldn't push yourself so hard. An injury like this takes time-"

John surprised himself, his fingers closing on Flint's sleeve before the latter could get up from the low stool and remove himself to a different part of the house, as was clearly his intent. "Stay," he said, managing to keep from sounding pleading only by the barest of margins.

Flint did, settling back onto the stool slowly, as if he was wary of what might come next. That was a rush - James Flint, wary of _him_. John supposed he had reason for it. He had hidden himself away behind the mask of the monster for long enough that he feared he would become it, and now he was letting John see past it, to the wounded and aching creature that lived beneath. John could ruin him. Would ruin him.

The truly frightening part was that he didn't want to. He had Nassau's most terrifying man in the cradle of his palms, to break or bend as he wished - but the thought of digging his claws into this vulnerability and cracking Flint open to expose his soul made his chest go tight, the same way it had when they had been prisoners in that cage, and Flint made plain his intent to die for the sake of his crew. John wondered if that meant he was still treading water at the surface, even though it felt like he had sunk to the depths of Flint's darkness.

"I shouldn't have." Flint didn't try to pull away from John's hold on his arm, but the reserve had returned. He held himself stiff, their knees no longer touching, his hands laced together in his lap.

He was still close, close enough that John could see the tightness around his eyes. Those eyes - so green, like the sea under the grey belly of stormclouds. John wondered how he had never seen the sadness in them before. "I never said I didn't want." He leaned in, keeping his movements slow, feeling like he was approaching a startled horse fit to bolt.

Flint held himself so perfectly still that at first John thought he might have completely misinterpreted. That notion was laid to rest at once when his breath ghosted over Flint's lips, so achingly close but still separated by inches, and Flint's breath shuddered like he couldn't catch it properly. John closed the distance, something like a surge of victory washing through him and setting his blood roaring in his ears again. Flint's beard was rough against his lips, but his mouth was soft, and his hands came to clutch at John's knees like a man scrabbling for a lifeline.

John put his hands over Flint's, smoothing his thumb over the weather-roughened knuckles. The kiss was slow, like the unfurling of a smoldering coal into a new flame. John would have expected Flint to be aggressive, a forceful conqueror here just as he was with everything else. The contrast was marked - Flint yielded to him as if it came naturally, allowing John to lead him, the grip of his fingers loosening under John's palms.

They separated to breathe, warm air mingling between their lips. "John," Flint whispered, and John kissed him again before he could say anything else. There was too much in his voice - too much longing, too much loneliness. John wondered how long it had been since someone touched him like this. He sucked gently at Flint's lip, and Flint groaned. His hands came up to wind through John's hair, tipping his head back to let Flint's tongue slide into his mouth.

Flint kissed like he wanted to breathe in John's air and crawl inside his skin, his palms splayed over John's jaw and his fingers buried in the dark curls of John's hair. John slid his hands inside Flint's coat, settling them on Flint's sides, his skin hot through the thin material of his shirt.

It seemed to go on forever - slow, dreamlike movements of their lips together, the gentle press of palms and the clutch of fingers. Neither of them could bring themselves to move - John wondered if Flint, too, believed that stopping this would break the spell between them. He didn't want to stop. It was too intoxicating to have Flint in his hands like this.

John was lightheaded when he finally had to pull away again, his skin prickled with gooseflesh and little jolts trickling down his spine. "James, God." He said it against Flint's lips, and Flint made another one of those sounds, a noise like he needed so badly and didn't know how to ask. It made John's breath catch in his chest. He had to kiss him again to swallow it down. He should have known better, should have seen that intimacy with Flint would be like the insistent tug of a riptide, pulling him deeper than he'd planned faster than he could stop.

A dog barked outside of the house, and they jerked apart like they'd been scalded, Flint's stool scooting back across the wood and John's back fetching up against the edge of the table. It made something sour twist in John's stomach - he was still a shameful secret, then, just as it had been when Flint sought his council, before he'd been made quartermaster. John laughed, short and self-deprecating, tugging his fingers through his hair. "Afraid the crew will find out you have a heart after all?"

Flint was still so bared to him, his eyes open and fixed on John with an arresting intensity, that John saw the anger that flickered through them as the barb hit its mark. "If I thought for a moment you actually _wanted_ me and not the power I could give you-"

"Fuck you, James," John snarled, knuckles whitening on the bench. "You either trust me or you don't. You can't keep straddling the line. You've given me more of yourself than you have to anyone else living, is it so hard to believe that the person you've shown me is desirable?" The anger bled out of Flint's face as quickly as it came, and there was that puzzled expression again - the pinch between his eyebrows, the subtle downturn of his mouth. It hit John like a shot from a cannon. "You don't believe that, do you?"

For the first time since John had known him, Flint looked away, either unable or unwilling to meet John's gaze. He looked vulnerable, the way he'd been in the cage, hunched in on himself and a thousand miles away. John thought he would have to break the silence again before it became awkward, but Flint finally spoke. "I don't want your pity."

"That works out quite nicely - I don't want yours, either." John's mouth twisted when Flint looked back up at him in surprise. "You think I haven't seen you watch me when I stumble? And this, now, you wanting to see and touch and make sure everything is fine - how do you suppose that looks?"

"You shouldn't be in pain," Flint said quietly. His fingers were laced together, elbows propped on his knees, and he was looking at John with that same open expression he'd had by the fire.

John's throat worked. The quiet honesty was more disarming than if Flint had tried to pass it off as professional concern, and John felt his indignation drain from him. "Neither should you."

Flint tensed, then rose from his seat on the stool, turning his back to John and moving away from him. Frustration rose thick in John's chest, his jaw clenched, and he felt like hitting something. From the glimpses of James he'd seen under the mask of Flint - which John was not entirely convinced was a mask any longer - he knew that Flint's loathing of himself ran deep. He had just never expected it to run this deep.

When Flint returned with a bottle and two cups in his hands, the tangle in John's chest unlocked a little, unravelling more when Flint poured them both a drink and settled back down on the stool. He rolled his cup between his hands as John sipped, staring down at it. John didn't interrupt his thoughts. He'd learned by now that if he left Flint in silence long enough, if he could resist his own natural inclination to fill the dead air with babble, Flint would give John more of himself.

"Do remember the night out at the Wrecks? When I saw you for the first time?" Flint looked up, his eyes crinkled at the memory, and John froze with his cup halfway to his lips.

"You mean, the night I burned the schedule page and put myself irrevocably in your path?" John snorted and took another drink. "How could I forget?"

Flint shook his head and topped off John's cup - clearly, he meant for this to be a long conversation. Or perhaps he thought that if John was drunk, he would ask fewer uncomfortable questions. "I had my knife to your throat and you _grinned_ at me. I could see how terrified you were - it showed in your eyes, even in the dark - but you still taunted me. You as much as told me to my face you'd outwitted me, and that before you had even a fraction of the power you hold now."

"If you're trying to flatter me, it's actually working." John was not an idiot - he'd seen Flint's eyes following him for some time, and not just with suspicion over the _Urca_ affair.

"Do you remember what you said at Eleanor's, when we had you copy it down and you left the rest of it out? About what stopped me from killing you once I'd gotten what I wanted?"

John took another long swallow of liquor. It burned all the way down his throat, and he had to swallow twice before he could speak. "I said we might be friends by then."

That smile was back, spreading across Flint's face, and he raised his cup, tipping his head to John as if he was acknowledging how right that prediction had been. John huffed into his cup as a smile of his own pulled at his lips.

"I do not ask after your health out of pity," Flint said, the smile fading into seriousness. Once again, John was caught by his gaze. "I ask because I have seen men lose limbs. I have seen some live, and some die, and I do not want to count you among the latter number."

"I'm not used to-" John gestured between them with the cup, his free hand locked around his thigh. The honesty Flint had given him deserved an answer, the same as it had when they sat around that fire. "I don't tend to stay in one place very long. I don't learn people, like I've learned you. I don't know them, so I don't care about them when I must cut ties and leave them." Flint's face locked up again in the inscrutable expression that had taken John so long to learn how to read. "You... the first time you saw me, you had a knife to my throat. The first time I saw you, you had the captain's log book, and I knew for a _fact_ Singleton hadn't stolen that page. You sold them on the lie. Even before you killed him, you told the story you needed to believe, and Billy made them believe it."

"He's good at that," Flint said wryly. "Long John Silver."

"Better than Scheherezad, I suppose. I don't suppose I'd make a very attractive woman anymore."

An interesting expression stole over Flint's face at that, something disbelieving and hungry at the same time. John filed it away for another time, and used Flint's silence to lean in. He moved his free hand from his own thigh to Flint's, thumb swiping at the inseam of his trousers. "I wanted you then. I was fucking terrified of you, but I knew I wouldn't meet another man like you on that island, not someone who had power the way _you_ had it."

"The way you wanted it." Flint's voice was hoarse. They were barely a hand's span apart now, poised to topple over the edge to the other side.

"It isn't about power, James." John fumbled behind him, set the cup safely on the table, pulled Flint's cup out of his hands and shoved it vaguely toward the same spot. He hooked his fingers around Flint's ribs, pulling him in closer, shifting his knees wider for Flint to fit between. "It's about you. It's been about you for longer than I let myself admit. Either we're going to destroy each other or we're going to rule the fucking world together, but I want it - all of it."

Flint silenced him before he could continue, his beard rough on John's mouth and his tongue insistent between John's teeth. John grinned into it, turning it wet and open-mouthed, his fingers digging into as much of Flint as he could get his hands on. His hand slid up Flint's thigh and met the hot length in his trousers. John rocked the heel of his hand against it, and Flint pulled back from the kiss only to press his face into John's throat, mouthing at his skin.

"Billy and his wide-eyed shadow will be back before too long," Flint said, his voice rough in John's ear. "As much as I would like to take you to bed."

John shuddered. Flint's breath was hot against his neck, he was hard under John's hand through the fabric. "And you said you weren't a gentleman." He sounded breathless - he felt it. He could also feel Flint's lips on his skin, brushing over his pounding pulse, teeth catching at his jaw, finally meeting his own again. This was shorter than the others, less of a promised seduction and more of a languishing comfort.

Flint stood from the stool and sat next to John on the bench, close enough that they were pressed together in a long line of contact. He leaned forward and retrieved the liquor, refilling both their cups. "Tell me about _Les mille et une nuits_."

"Your accent is worse than mine." John leaned into Flint, letting his weight rest on his good leg and on the man next to him.

"Miranda didn't have a copy that I know of, and we're unlikely to find one. This Scheherezade seems to have stuck in your mind - I'd like to know the story." Flint spoke as if he hadn't heard.

John grinned into his cup. "It's a long tale. The title translates to 'A Thousand and One Nights.'"

"That's at least two years," Flint said. Someone who didn't know him as well wouldn't hear that the lightness in his voice was forced, that he was truly waiting for an answer.

"At least," John agreed. Something panicked beat against his ribs. He had never bound himself to a place before, much less a person. But Long John Silver was as much a part of Nassau as Captain Flint, now, and every time the wary thought of _too close_ crossed his mind, it didn't feel as right as it had before. He could feel the tension unwind in Flint's body at the answer.

"For me, it was King Arthur - the boy everyone thought would never amount to anyone, who surprised them all by becoming the greatest king that England would ever know." Flint shifted, draping his arm across John's shoulders and pulling him closer in. "What was it about her that stayed with you?"

"Scheherazade told stories," John said. "She married a Sultan who was known for murdering his wives, and told him only enough of each story to have him begging her to finish it in the morning."

Flint let out a short laugh. "Easy to see now why you liked her so much."

"Don't interrupt," John said, taking a drink to wet his throat. "Do you want to hear them or not?"

"At least until Billy gets back," Flint said. "To pass the time."

John knew better, grinning into his cup and leaning against the solid line of Flint's chest. "Scheherazade was the Sultan's vizier's oldest daughter. She was beautiful, but more importantly, she was clever and quick-witted."

John's voice filled the stillness of the house, and Flint's callused palm hooked around the back of his neck, fingers pushing through his hair. The places where they fit together were like points of warmth against him, and he let himself sink against it as the sun sank lower in the sky, speaking of deserts far across the world and clever storytellers who wove their own fates.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic wandered around on me a bit, but ultimately I feel like I did what I wanted with it. Thanks for the excellent prompt!


End file.
